The Arkansaw traveler., 1887-10-22
THE IDIOTS OF FASHION.
BY F DONAS.

What egregious idiots in many re- spects legions of the he and she etfigies of humanity in soft taify that make up the world of fashion are. Their whole lives are cut, like their trousers and polonaises, by the prevailing pat tern. They dress, not for comfort or adornment, but for style. They sleep and eat, not when and as health and nature demand, but as the dictates of French menus and pigeon tailed masters of ceremonies require. They talk the inane gibberish of ball rooms and milliners' shops, because others of the cfe0m dc la cream, and that skinned again, are poll parrots and ring-tail monkeys enough 10 know no better. They are as exactly alike in chal acter as in clothes, in ideas and expressions as in coats and bonnets- as like as the same number of little chunks of quack-doctor pill dough before they are rolled into purgative pellets.
 Even ill their travels they are mo- notony on wheels; they go, like wild geese or paroquets, in tlocks, never venturing to take one original side flight or to glance at anything not laid down i'll guide books for fashion able imbecility. Every one of all the absurd myriad ofcombined butterflies and poodles must make precisely the same tour of the world, at precisely the same season, and precisely in the same manner that every other one of the same genus of elegant asininities makes or has made it-must cross the same seas and lakes, climb the same mountains and monuments, perch in Romeo and Juliet attitudes on the same crags, and pour out the same cheap stereotyped aptures in the same namby- pamby phrases.
 And thousands of really sensible peo- pie, caught by the garish glitter of society frivolities, fall into line and follow the aimless paths of these fash ionable numskulls and melodies. They choose the same routes and times, en- dure the same bores and Deliberations, whirl and paddle through the same scenes along the same beaten tracks, go into mechanical ecstacies, shout, grunt, growl, and damn through the same intending gamut of rambling stupidities, and miss nine- -tenths of all creation's grandest and most glo- rious displays.
 In all the gilt-edged guide books of fashionable tourists there is no men, tion of the transcendent glories of autumn on the upper Mississippi and in the far northwest; no hint of the charms and delights of trip through the Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Dakota fairylsnd of lakes and dells and crystal streams in all the wild magnificence of frost-wrought color Ing. Language reels, weak and hump shouldered, under an attempt to de- scribe it. All the pencils and brushes of all the Titians, Turner's and Claude Lorraines that could be stacked be- tween Minnehaha and Popocatepetl, or Winnipeg and the Eads jetties, would be incompetent to knock chip off the shoulder of an effort to de- pict it.
 Who that has ever seen it does not TetlcttlDtf tHdL WOUutTluI plCtuTt Oi "Autumnal Scenes in the Catskills," i" on which Cropsey bankrupted his capacity for colors? When it was ex- hibited at the St. Louis exposition, some years ago, Nellie Hazeltine, the famous belle of that ancient village herself a fit subject for a poem or a painting-as she stood with me before it, exclaimed: Ut would be exquisite, if it were not impossiblew And yet, if that picture, with all its gorgeous and seemingly supernatural richness and variety of hues, were stretched a thousand miles in length and multi piled to infinity in tints, it would scarcely give an overdrawn idea of a journey at this season from St. Louis or Chicago to Minneapolis, Devils Lake, or the Yellowstone, over the Minneapolis < St. Louis, Chicago < Alton, Rock Island, Northern Pacific, Manitoba, or any other of the great northwestern lines.
 Beautiful as this paradisean lake